Summer Glau and Last Night’s Adolescent Males

Well, it's Monday and there you are thinking to yourself, "Golly, I wonder if Josh watched TV last night." Come on now, what kind of a silly question is that? Obviously I watched TV. It's what I do. I sat there and I watched Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles last night. I sat there and watched the new season of Scott Baio is 46… and Single, too.

What I didn't do was watch the Golden Globes press conference. What sort of foolishness was that anyway? I completely understand the need of the Hollywood Foreign Press to put out their awards, but I don't understand why NBC tried to make a three-hour special out of it. Two hours of Dateline is almost always too much, and then an hour of awards being announced that took about half the time if you chose to watch it on CNN, or E!, or TV Guide, or wherever else it was shown. Yeah, I can't imagine it.

Okay, Sarah Connor and my thoughts (you're reading this so it's kind of implied that you asked for my thoughts). I enjoyed it. I really liked it. I felt like it was big budget Hollywood action come to the small screen. I imagine that they blew a large chunk of their production budget on last night's episode and that future ones won't be quite so special effects heavy though. The question will be how the show deals with the story of the people involved and not just the whiz-bang nifty bits of action. Managing those two elements (whiz-bang nifty bits of action and character stories) may be a tall order, particularly for a show that didn't get to shoot 22 episodes before the strike reared its ugly head. We'll have to see.

I think Summer Glau was great last night, and Lena Headey could totally be Sarah Connor. Thomas Dekker I'm still a little unsure of as John; he seemed awfully tentative and fearful, but I guess that's how John's supposed to be right now. That certainly wasn't the same John though that we saw in T2 and I have something of a hard time imagining that John morphing into this one. Is it possible that his mother's love made him weak?

Eventually, and I wonder how long it'll take, John is going to be hacking into some huge computer system to get the top secret information they're going to be after. I don't really know what computer system, but I imagine the information will be about Skynet. After all, last night his mother looked at him and admonished him for hacking as soon as he mentioned the word "computer." That there is what people in the know call "foreshadowing."

Enough of that adolescent though… let's take a quick turn to the other adolescent I watched last night, Scott Baio. Sure, the man is 46 years old, but he acts like he's 17. Yes, he's taken a step or two forward from the start of last season – he proposed to his girlfriend and learned he was going to be a father – but he acted incredibly immature last night. I couldn't tell whether it was a ploy for the purpose of the TV show, a joke, or who the man truly is, however. I hope that he's far more adult than how it seems. I wouldn't want him to be the father of my child (not that such a thing is yet possible) if he always acts as young as he did yesterday. There comes a time when an adult, fully grown man has to step up and act like one. If he's not going to do it when his child is on her way there's a problem. But I tend to think it's an act for the benefit of the cameras. It's not cute or funny and he doesn't seem to understand that, but maybe he'll figure it out.

About Josh Lasser

Josh has deftly segued from a life of being pre-med to film school to television production to writing about the media in general. And by 'deftly' he means with agonizing second thoughts and the formation of an ulcer.